The Scientific Case for Intelligent Design

[PersianPaladin]

Yes it can.

There, that told him.

It's a theory OON...not a fact. Otherwise there would be no room for debate.

[flagpole]

It can't create new information....

Why not?

[kar999]

You're either going to rely on random mutation or intelligent design.

Well we certainly see plenty of random mutation round here. B)

Edited July 11, 2007 by kar999

[Osbourne One-Nil]

I think it would be pretty unfair of me to sit back and just let Persian Paladin be abused like this. But there you go.

[PersianPaladin]

Why not?

In meiosis, the diploid cell's genome, which is composed of ordered structures of coiled DNA called chromosomes, is replicated once and separated twice, producing four haploid cells each containing half of the original cell's chromosomes. These resultant haploid cells will fertilize with other haploid cells of the opposite gender to form a diploid cell again. The cyclical process of separation by meiosis and genetic recombination through fertilization is called the life cycle. The result is that the offspring produced during germination after meiosis will have a slightly different blueprint which has instructions for the cells to work, contained in the DNA. However, meiosis and sexual reproduction combined do not have the capacity to produce new information, the diversification is due to genes that are already there being swapped / mixed and some genes may become dominant whereas others become recessive etc.

http://www.wasdarwinright.net/adapt&mutate-f.htm

People arguing for evolution say that over large time-scales, mutation enters as a factor within the crossover. However, their argument falls down when you see the jump-start nature of evolution and the occurence of new species at the same time as other differing species.

I think it would be pretty unfair of me to sit back and just let Persian Paladin be abused like this. But there you go.

At least I've got the balls to stick to my argument and be prepared to get insulted\abused in the process.

B)

[Osbourne One-Nil]

You've got balls alright, as have chimps, hedgehogs, bats, etc etc etc.

[flagpole]

PP have you read all of that site?

It is incredible!!!

I am not going to be swayed by the opinions of people who actually believe the bible literally and that the earth was created in 6 days with no evidence whatsoever.

I really worry about the way you seem to jump on random bandwagons. First 9/11, then the neo-cons, now Intelligent design. I can understand wanting to question the world in which we live but try not to swallow everything you read on the internet.

You know fully well what is presented by some people online can be a total lie!

[PersianPaladin]

PP have you read all of that site?

It is incredible!!!

I am not going to be swayed by the opinions of people who actually believe the bible literally and that the earth was created in 6 days with no evidence whatsoever.

I really worry about the way you seem to jump on random bandwagons. First 9/11, then the neo-cons, now Intelligent design. I can understand wanting to question the world in which we live but try not to swallow everything you read on the internet.

You know fully well what is presented by some people online can be a total lie!

The truth is the truth, no matter what mouth it comes out of.

Some people have agendas and take liberties with the truth or try and bend it to fit with their agenda. I don't follow the bible and I don't think the world was created in six days, however, certain points even creationists make are valid (despite the religious bullcrap).

Edited July 11, 2007 by PersianPaladin

[flagpole]

Some people have agendas and take liberties with the truth

Would you ever do that PP? Would you ever tell a fib so that your point would seem more valid?

[PersianPaladin]

Would you ever do that PP? Would you ever tell a fib so that your point would seem more valid?

No.

If I did such a thing it would be a completely pointless exercise.

[Osbourne One-Nil]

Can we try and stick to the topic and base any points on what PP has said here, and not elsewhere please?

(this refers to a hidden post, in case it doesn't make any sense)

[VillagePlank]

It can't create new information....

Patently untrue. That'd be because of the combinatorics

Whilst it is true that you wouldn't be creating an addition to AGCT the combinations produced by crossover and mutation thereof have a huge capacity to encode new proteins.

Consider the computer: this works on a simple binary scheme - this means you can quite happily create a huge plethora of different information solely on the difference between 0, and 1. Indeed, you can change the meaning of a string simply by inverting a bit - for instance consider the following 10001111 (#10#=143) but invert one bit, say, 11001111 (#10#=207) changes the value of the information contained.

Of course, when one thinks about this with reference to the genome the potential is staggering. As an example consider the following strings:

10100011

11101010

I shall consider these as skin colourings on a horse, so if you suspend reality for just a second, and imagine that those 1's mean dark patches, and the 0's mean light patches. Of course the real genome probably works much more like the aRGB format ...

Now if we considered that these horses were running around in the African savannah quite happily grazing on grass, and minding their own business, when a lion came along and started hunting them. Now I could have encoded some sort of speed protocol in their genome which, of course, suffers from the same problems as the first example - invert a bit, and the difference in speed is quite exaggerated (not much change, for a very significant result - in this case 143kph against 207kph - they're fast horses. If the lion's top speed was 180kph, only one of the horses would survive) but I have omitted a discussion of this for brevity.

Anyway, back to the lion; we shall assume in this case, that the lion was a late arrival - that is our two horses have managed to reproduce before the lion turns up and eats the horses. We shall assume that when they mated equal crossover occured bisecting their genome, and no mutation occured. We are left with a child that has the genome (for it's colouring) as:

10101010

And what do you know? We have a zebra - which is far more likely to survive to reproduction (due to camoulflage) than it's blotchy parents. There is no chance here that there is a designer as the only direction present is pressure from the environment, and although this is quite a cartoonesque illustration, the notion of speciation becomes only a problem of scale, and not of mechanics.

Also note: no-one designed the stripes however designed they might look to you or someone else. You might like to modify your argument and say that the process is designed, but the outcome of the process is certainly not.

Edited July 11, 2007 by VillagePlank

[PersianPaladin]

Patently untrue. That'd be because of the combinatorics

Whilst it is true that you wouldn't be creating an addition to AGCT the combinations produced by crossover and mutation thereof have a huge capacity to encode new proteins.

Consider the computer: this works on a simple binary scheme - this means you can quite happily create a huge plethora of different information solely on the difference between 0, and 1. Indeed, you can change the meaning of a string simply by inverting a bit - for instance consider the following 10001111 (#10#=143) but invert one bit, say, 11001111 (#10#=207) changes the value of the information contained.

Of course, when one thinks about this with reference to the genome the potential is staggering. As an example consider the following strings:

10100011

11101010

I shall consider these as skin colourings on a horse, so if you suspend reality for just a second, and imagine that those 1's mean dark patches, and the 0's mean light patches. Of course the real genome probably works much more like the aRGB format ...

Now if we considered that these horses were running around in the African savannah quite happily grazing on grass, and minding their own business, when a lion came along and started hunting them. Now I could have encoded some sort of speed protocol in their genome which, of course, suffers from the same problems as the first example - invert a bit, and the difference in speed is quite exaggerated (not much change, for a very significant result - in this case 143kph against 207kph - they're fast horses. If the lion's top speed was 180kph, only one of the horses would survive) but I have omitted a discussion of this for brevity.

Anyway, back to the lion; we shall assume in this case, that the lion was a late arrival - that is our two horses have managed to reproduce before the lion turns up and eats the horses. We shall assume that when they mated equal crossover occured bisecting their genome, and no mutation occured. We are left with a child that has the genome (for it's colouring) as:

10101010

And what do you know? We have a zebra - which is far more likely to survive to reproduction (due to camoulflage) than it's blotchy parents. There is no chance here that there is a designer as the only direction present is pressure from the environment, and although this is quite a cartoonesque illustration, the notion of speciation becomes only a problem of scale, and not of mechanics.

Also note: no-one designed the stripes however designed they might look to you or someone else. You might like to modify your argument and say that the process is designed, but the outcome of the process is certainly not.

Unfortunately, what you are describing is not speciation...but adaptation.

We have been through this before, the process of crossover does not change the fundamental dna-set of the species. 'It' merely reshuffles the existing parameters allowed by the genome for environmental variation within its constraints.

To begin the process of speciation we have to either rely on synonymous random mutations in both sexes of the relevant species or some sort of Intelligent Design principle.

Edited July 11, 2007 by PersianPaladin

[Bobby]

Well, still no evidence that life is created / driven by a supreme being. It's all well to say evolution is wrong, but if evolution is wrong, where's the backing evidence for the other theory? And I mean physical empirical evidence.

[PersianPaladin]

Well, still no evidence that life is created / driven by a supreme being. It's all well to say evolution is wrong, but if evolution is wrong, where's the backing evidence for the other theory? And I mean physical empirical evidence.

To be honest....its quite a job for me to convince the sceptics. I can say that the origin of life and species are tied, and that certain design principles are seemingly inherent today as they always were for many thousands of years. Chance and chaos theory are basically things\processes we devise for real-time interactions so complex that we cannot fully understand the mechanisms (e.g. in weather-processes).

All I can try to do is to say that something is keeping life in synergy\harmony\symbiosis, except for perhaps...our own greed and unbalancing ways from time to time. I am fascinated about the concept of micro\macro-cosmic replication of design principles beyond the world of biota and into plasma, etc. Sacred geometry is something I'm also looking into. I am by no means 'certain' about Intelligent Design, but I find it more convinvincing than the theory of evolution.

Edited July 11, 2007 by PersianPaladin

[crimsone]

Well, still no evidence that life is created / driven by a supreme being. It's all well to say evolution is wrong, but if evolution is wrong, where's the backing evidence for the other theory? And I mean physical empirical evidence.

I did wonder that... The thread title is "The Scientific Case for Intelligent Design", but having read through the entire thread as it's been written, I have seen no such scientific case. I've seen little more than even vague and fleeting attempts at such a case if even those. What there is a lot of here is attempts to use supposition and philosophy to discredit evolutionary theory, but that does not make a case for Intelligent Design.

Intelligent design as a scientific subject is, in my opinion, a very clever ploy. It has been established that science cannot prove the existence of a supreme being (god to be specific, but any other supreme being is equally applicable), which throws creationism right out of the scientific spectrum. What the ID philosophy does is to obsfucate that issue... It turns the question around... it tries to prove the probable existance of such a supreme being through the medium of natural diversity and complexity.

There is NOTHING so complex that it cannot occur by any variety of means, be it chance or be it design. An example is a snowflake... billions have fallen, and each one of them different. To suggest one or the other, or anything outside or in between these two points as the more likely cause/origin of a complexity with no supporting evidence is nothing more than either a guess or a belief. On one hand, evolutionary theory has been around for around 150 yrs, and has stood firm and quite solid in spite of its original (and continuing) challenge and ridicule by the church, and scientific scrutiny so far. On the other hand, we have ID, for which the only substantive scientific evidence we could hope to gain in support of ID is proof of the existence of an intelligent designer (AKA a supreme being of some sort).

Edited July 11, 2007 by crimsone

[PersianPaladin]

I did wonder that... The thread title is "The Scientific Case for Intelligent Design", but having read through the entire thread as it's been written, I have seen no such scientific case. I've seen little more than even vague and fleeting attempts at such a case if even those. What there is a lot of here is attempts to use supposition and philosophy to discredit evolutionary theory, but that does not make a case for Intelligent Design.

Intelligent design as a scientific subject is, in my opinion, a very clever ploy. It has been established that science cannot prove the existence of a supreme being (god to be specific, but any other supreme being is equally applicable), which throws creationism right out of the scientific spectrum. What the ID philosophy does is to obsfucate that issue... It turns the question around... it tries to prove the probable existance of such a supreme being through the medium of natural diversity and complexity.

There is NOTHING so complex that it cannot occur by any variety of means, be it chance or be it design. An example is a snowflake... billions have fallen, and each one of them different. To suggest one or the other, or anything outside or in between these two points as the more likely cause/origin of a complexity with no supporting evidence is nothing more than either a guess or a belief. On one hand, evolutionary theory has been around for around 150 yrs, and has stood firm and quite solid in spite of its original (and continuing) challenge and ridicule by the church, and scientific scrutiny so far. On the other hand, we have ID, for which the only substantive scientific evidence we could hope to gain in support of ID is proof of the existence of an intelligent designer (AKA a supreme being of some sort).

Well...the thread title reflects the initial video I posted.

What you say about the snow-flake is interesting however. Mind you, snowflakes are not really functioning entities like biomass or solar systems, pressure-systems, etc. However, there may be evidence that the structure of their crystals reflects some sort of innate intelligence within water. Here: -

http://www.life-enthusiast.com/twilight/research_emoto.htm

[shuggee]

Here's some reading for you PP:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1480450/posts

[PersianPaladin]

Here's some reading for you PP:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1480450/posts

Thanks Shugee. Most obliged.

[Red Raven]

Forget the bible or religion.

i wish more people would.

[PersianPaladin]

i wish more people would.

I guess its fair to say that investigation in the real world should take priority before any 'belief'.

[VillagePlank]

Unfortunately, what you are describing is not speciation...but adaptation.

Wrong.

We have been through this before, the process of crossover does not change the fundamental dna-set of the species. 'It' merely reshuffles the existing parameters allowed by the genome for environmental variation within its constraints.

So? What is a species is if it isn't a subset of all possible AGCT combinations? what you say makes no logical sense and hides behind rhetoric.

To begin the process of speciation we have to either rely on synonymous random mutations in both sexes of the relevant species or some sort of Intelligent Design principle.

Simply: not true, again. Just because you believe that mutation is the driving force of Darwinism, it doesn't make it so, nor is that what Darwin - or those who came later - actually said. If you want to criticise something straighten out in your mind what you are criticising. For a start you can forget about mutation - it is almost an irrelevance in evolutionary theory. I'll say it for the final time: forget about mutation. OK one more time - this time in bold (in the vain attempt that it might sink past the dogma that makes up your brain: forget about mutation

I can say that the origin of life and species are tied, and that certain design principles are seemingly inherent today as they always were for many thousands of years.

But that's supposition and not subject to any process of rigour. You can say what you want, but if you want to be taken seriously, I would prefix it with something useful.

Here's some reading for you PP:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1480450/posts

Unfortunately, shuggee, this reading material is exactly why PP (and others) support the idiotic notion that 'it looks like someone made it therefore it is'

Even the first link is a non-sequitor. Who created the creator? Well if there was a creator, then he created time, so there was no before. It's simple. Very simple.

People just like to dress it up it dog biscuits. And I've had enough of it.

Rant over.

EDIT: and I didn't mean dog-biscuits, either.

Edited July 11, 2007 by VillagePlank

[PersianPaladin]

[snip]

There are three basic mechanisms of evolutionary change: natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow. Natural selection favors genes that improve capacity for survival and reproduction. Genetic drift is the random sampling of a generation's genes during reproduction, causing random changes in the frequency of alleles, and gene flow is the transfer of genes within and between populations. The relative importance of natural selection and genetic drift in a population varies depending on the strength of the selection and the effective population size, which is the number of individuals capable of breeding.^[39] Natural selection usually predominates in large populations, while genetic drift dominates in small populations. The dominance of genetic drift in small populations can even lead to the fixation of slightly deleterious mutations ^[40]. As a result, changing population size can dramatically influence the course of evolution. Population bottlenecks, where the population shrinks temporarily and therefore loses genetic variation, result in a more uniform population.^[14] Bottlenecks also result from alterations in gene flow such as decreased migration, expansions into new habitats, or population subdivision.^[39]

Source: Wikipedia

I have been arguing that the variation of species and continued appearance of such species in differing time periods (often at the same time in certain fossil records) shows an order and harmony. Not by chance or randomness.

Don't know where you get your revisionist-evolution theories from.

[VillagePlank]

I have been arguing that the variation of species and continued appearance of such species in differing time periods (often at the same time in certain fossil records) shows an order and harmony. Not by chance or randomness.

I haven't said it's by chance or by random. It is driven from the environment. This is very basic stuff. I do not know who authored the wikipedia article, but they are clearly not up to the job. Whilst crossover locus might indeed be, at the cursory level, random, it is the environment in which the genome exists that decides whether or not the genome will reproduce. Which is not random. Which does not rely on mutation. Which does not rely on a designer.

Don't know where you get your revisionist-evolution theories from.

Experience, my dear boy, experience. It is also the case that I can read.

However, there may be evidence that the structure of their crystals reflects some sort of innate intelligence within water. Here: -

http://www.life-enthusiast.com/twilight/research_emoto.htm

How you can consider this possiblity is beyond me. I have to admit.

Edited July 11, 2007 by VillagePlank

[Admiral_Bobski]

The second link in that FreeRepublic list is actually extraordinarily good. Here's a direct link for those who are interested:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/coyne05/coyne05_index.html

It took me bloomin' ages to read, partially because I'm not the fastest reader on the planet, partially because it's a pretty long article and partially because I have three children pestering me all afternoon :lol: However, I think it addresses every single one of PP's objections to Evolution and succinctly rebuts all of those objections.

CB

PS - I was going to make some pithy comments about intelligent water and vestigial organs, but I have thought better of it...